A Very Private Celebrity (34 page)
Read A Very Private Celebrity Online
Authors: Hugh Purcell
As often happens when a new manager takes over a team, a period of good fortune followed. LWT sold the hugely successful comedy series
Doctor in the House
and
Doctor at Sea
to the USA. The government halved the levy on advertising and thus restored confidence in the industry. By the end of the year, ITV’s overall revenue had reached its highest annual increase since 1964. This left Freeman to see off one predator threatening the company from the outside, Thames Television, and one challenger to his authority from the inside, Rupert Murdoch.
Thames TV had wasted no time suggesting to Aidan Crawley that a merger of sorts should take place between the five-day-a-week TV supplier in the London area and the weekend supplier. Crawley was interested but Freeman saw this as the thin end of the wedge. At a
working dinner at Crawley’s house, Freeman and his new programme controller Cyril Bennett went head to head with the Thames chairman Lord Shawcross (an old colleague of Freeman’s from the Attlee government); his managing director, Howard Thomas; and his director of programmes, Brian Tesler. Freeman did not mince his words. He complained that Thames had been traducing LWT and then, as a diplomatic gesture, offered a few crumbs of cooperation like sharing Outside Broadcast units. Shortly afterwards he persuaded the ITA to ask Thames to beef up its current affairs output, thus taking the burden off LWT, and show fewer high-rating US programmes, thus allowing LWT to replace them with its own buy-ins without overstepping the quota. After this decisive intervention, relations between LWT and the whole of ITV improved.
Freeman said:
It was my job to hold Murdoch in check, because to have allowed him to continue interfering in the company would have spelt simple and rapid disaster. We had a rather odd relationship over quite a long period and became, I hope, friends. I certainly became, and remain, fond of him, and I think he is a decent and much abused man. However, our relationship was based on the fact that I had to prevent him doing what he wanted to do until eventually, and quite inevitably, he decided to focus his energies elsewhere.
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On another occasion, he said of Murdoch: ‘I trust Rupert. I don’t trust him to be nice, you know, but I trust he will do what he says he’s going to do.’
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Soon, Murdoch quit the board because he got involved in United States ventures and nominated Bert Hardy, the director of sales, to replace him. In 1979 he sold nearly all his shares in LWT at a profit. He always acknowledged that ‘undoubtedly, John Freeman
saved the company’. David Frost switched allegiances too. He signed a contract with the BBC and sold his LWT shares in 1976.
Freeman’s impact was making itself felt. At the regular IBA Policy Committee Meetings (in 1972 the Independent Television Authority became the Independent Broadcasting Authority when radio was added) the chairmen of all fifteen companies would sit round a table with the IBA top brass and, in the case of the main ITV companies, their directors of programmes too. This is where Brian Tesler got to know John Freeman:
For four years at least, John and I sat next to each other, joining in the discussions of programme policy, strategy, and so on. [Tesler was then director of programmes for Thames TV.] Naturally, we got to know each other rather well. He had an agile and very clear brain and a magnificent way of expressing himself. I mean when John Freeman spoke, you listened. It sounded good, even if it possibly wasn’t right, it was convincing. And there was magnetism about the man that he never lost. And he looked so good! This tall, straight, very handsome man, with quiet confidence. You knew he was a man of great power and strength but I never saw him lose his temper, nor vilify anyone. With this agile brain, with a marvellous use of language … how could he not succeed?
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One of Murdoch’s recruits to LWT had been an East End boy, Ron Miller, who became head of sales working under Bert Hardy. He and Freeman joined the company roughly at the same time and became good friends:
I first met John a few days after he joined the company in an office in Old Burlington Street. There was a complete suite of offices empty
as Rupert Murdoch had fired most of the executives. He was sat behind a desk and he rose as I walked in. The first thing that struck me was his physical presence. He was tall, very upright and he had a magnificent head of hair. And then, of course, there was the voice. I remember him from his
Face to Face
days. Before I did my National Service I simply made a date to watch every one of these shows. I was already in awe of him.
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Not long afterwards, Freeman asked Miller to organise a drinks party in Old Burlington Street (where the sales team had remained in the heart of the advertising district) so he could meet them all. What happened became an instant LWT legend:
Halfway through, Elizabeth Wagg, John’s secretary, came in. She said to him, ‘President Nixon is on the line.’ John turned to me and said, ‘Ron, would you mind if I take this call?’ I just laughed. When he had put the phone down he turned to the room and said, ‘It’s a pity there are no advertisers here.’
Very soon Freeman announced how he intended to resolve the contradiction between the public service duty demanded by the ITA and the commercial
raison d’être
of ITV. He told advertisers in November 1972:
The significant duty that LWT has to learn the hard way is that at weekends, against the relentless build-up of entertainment programming of BBC One, minority programmes at peak-time lose not only their own time period but the entire evening’s viewing. Our specialist programmes must be strategically placed with very great care. We will make these programmes because they are essential for our prestige and because they are important in their own right; however, we
will quarantine them and ensure that high ratings programmes are not infected.
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From then on, with the few exceptions such as
Aquarius
and later
Weekend World
, money was put into programmes that would earn high audiences and therefore could charge high advertising rates. Under the director of programmes, Cyril Bennett, whom Freeman described as ‘a sort of genius’, such home-grown programmes as
Upstairs, Downstairs, Budgie, Please Sir!
and
On the Buses
soon began to dent the BBC’s weekend ratings, and were networked.
The World of Sport
rivalled
Match of the Day
while the arts programme
Aquarius
was loved by the arts reviewers and
Weekend World
became a benchmark in analytical current affairs programming. For a while the ITA was satisfied. Other companies followed LWT’s definition of public service broadcasting the ITV way and soon John Freeman with Denis Foreman, the chairman of Granada, became the leading spokesmen for the companies on the IBA Policy Committee.
The chief executive was no Grace Wyndham Goldie. He rarely aired his own views about LWT output and stuck to a management overview. For him a programme was a product that needed the right audience appeal and the right placing in order to attract the right revenue. He did occasionally express an opinion, such as a long and esoteric exchange of notes with the producer of
Upstairs, Downstairs
about whether or not butlers in Edwardian England wore moustaches.
In June 1972, LWT moved from Wembley to a new building that became as celebrated as its chief executive. Kent House, as it is still known, occupies a site by the South Bank Centre on the Thames, the hub of the British media arts world. The facilities were state of the art; it was glossy and glamorous. Some called it Camelot. Keen to project this image, Freeman suggested that the new weekly arts
programme presented by Melvyn Bragg should be called
The South Bank Show.
Freeman became worried about Cyril Bennett’s workload – ‘You may be interested that neither the Prime Minister nor the President of the United States carry your load of day-to-day detail’ – and urged him to delegate by appointing a head of light entertainment. Bennett had his eye on young Michael Grade, then running his father’s talent agency because Leslie Grade was convalescing in France after serious medical treatment. This required tact, not least because the three Grade brothers, Lew, Leslie and Bernard, were forces to be reckoned with throughout the British film and TV world. Freeman offered to visit him in France and ‘ask for his son’s hand in marriage’. This he did, to the surprise and pleasure of Leslie, who told his son he had respected Freeman for years. ‘Doesn’t that show the sheer class of the man!’ Ron Miller exclaimed to me. Michael Grade’s admiration for Freeman thereafter knew no bounds:
Inspirational! He just had to turn up! It was enough to know he was in the building to feel safe. You felt his presence even when he wasn’t in the room. He had absolutely no enemies in the company. He had time for everybody, without being patronising.
We all saw him as a quintessential English gentleman of his generation. He had immaculate manners and never displayed emotion: reserved and private, yes, but I don’t accept this ‘enigma’ description of John. His defining feature was a lack of ego. He had no need to impress anyone, and there was no point in flattering him. He was just John.
He was of course very formidable. He was definitely not a man you would tell lies to.
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Cyril Bennett’s next big appointment was the producer of
The Frost Programme
, John Birt, who came from Granada Television to beef up
the current affairs output. Freeman said, ‘I became very high on him – he was extremely good news.’
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Birt was attracted to LWT because while it was now stable, indeed ‘on the up’, the exodus of talented programme makers in 1969 meant ‘it was still something of a greenfield site; in terms of current affairs the cupboard was bare’. Granada, on the other hand, ‘was stuffed with talent’. Birt started the mould-breaking
Weekend World
in 1972 and that was followed by
The London Programme
, both highly regarded by the serious-minded Brian Young, now director-general of the IBA.
Freeman’s next task, in order reduce Cyril Bennett’s workload and to plan for his own succession, was to appoint a deputy. Although Brian Tesler was expecting to succeed Howard Thomas as managing director of Thames Television, there happened to be a break in his contract. Having ascertained that he could approach Tesler without impropriety, Freeman invited him over to his house in Kew. They walked round the garden, discovered they had a common birthday, a shared like of American crime fiction, and a dislike of Oxbridge intellectual snobbery; soon the deal was done. In May 1974, Tesler joined LWT as deputy chief executive on the understanding that he would succeed Freeman in two years if his probation worked out.
Freeman sprang a probationary test soon after Tesler’s arrival. Despite Michael Grade’s initiatives, comedy programmes were disappointing. At one of the occasional staff meetings held in a large studio someone wanted to know why. Instead of asking Bennett or Grade for their views, Freeman turned to Tesler, catching him unawares:
The only thing I could think of saying was, ‘It reminds me of my uncle who invented a drink called
One Up
, and it didn’t work. The following year he invented another drink and he called it
Two Up
, and that didn’t sell. And in successive years,
Three Up, Four Up
and
Five Up
didn’t sell either so he threw in the towel. The following year someone invented
Seven Up
and made a fortune.’ The implication was that we will carry on trying and get there in the end. There was a big laugh. On the way out, John said – and here’s the Jewishness of LWT coming out – ‘Congratulations, that was your Bar Mitzvah.’
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The chief executive belonged to the school of management that believes a light hand on the tiller when the company is doing well is the best way to attract new talent. It is the hiring and firing that is important. In three years LWT had recruited three of the outstanding leaders of the British TV industry of the future. Lord Grade became chief executive of Channel 4, chairman of the BBC and then executive chairman of ITV; Lord Birt became director-general of the BBC; and Brian Tesler CBE became managing director and chairman of LWT, as well as governor of the British Film Institute, vice-president of the Royal Television Society and similar honours. There was one other key appointment to come. John Birt said Freeman reminded him of football manager Sir Alex Ferguson; he was an astute talent scout and he planned ahead. No one called him a ‘people person’, in the sense that he rarely gossiped, but the consensus at LWT was that he was a shrewd judge of people. As Robert Cassen had discovered in Washington: ‘John seemed to have your measure but you never seemed to have his.’
Despite the glamorous South Bank image, the new studios and the display cabinets of awards in the foyer, LWT was no longer ‘best boy’ with the IBA. In its review of 1974, the IBA criticised the lack of resources and time given to programmes about religion, on adult education and for children. Freeman objected to its headmasterly tone and demanded clarification. When it came, Freeman was irritated further. The IBA now extended its criticism to drama: ‘Can there be
some causal relationship between the uneven achievement of LWT drama and the proportion of freelance staff in the drama department? Do you have anything that can be described as a drama department at all?’ Freeman wrote a draft reply: ‘The blunt answer to the first question is “No” and to the second “Yes”.’
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The IBA did not back down and when it renewed the LWT franchise in 1975 it pointedly repeated its criticisms, as well as noting LWT’s many achievements. This criticism went back to the basic belief of Sir Brian Young that ‘the answer to the old question whether ITV should reflect or lead the interests and tastes of the public must be that it should do both. The balance it strikes between the two will always be more ambitious than is to be found in a solely commercial service.’
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Freeman did not object to that in principle but he became increasingly opposed to the IBA practice of awarding franchises to competing companies in the first place. The truth was that he was no friend of the IBA (he had turned down the offer to be considered for the post of director-general as long ago as 1970) and this would become the main issue of his chairmanship of LWT in the years ahead.